This is what happens when you catch a cold (*sniffle*)
I’ve been here before - the last time I hit this spot I simply hit the big “Mark All As Read” button, but for some reason I can’t just bring myself to do that this time…sigh…
The venerable creator of Ruby fights without fighting. This is in response to all the back and forth about Joel’s spot on language wars which seems to have the bulk of the Rails proverbial knickers in a twist, including DHH. I *love* matz’s response to this (from the ruby-talk mailing list):
|On Sep 1, 2006, at 9:20 AM, Rob Sanheim wrote:
|
|> I find it amusing that he says Rails is too risky and new, yadda
|> yadda, but then he goes on to talk about their in-house language,
|> “Wasabi”:
|
|I too found that beyond ironic.That indicates that he trusts himself, and not me (Ruby). And I think
he’s right.matz.
This gem (pun completely intended) was found via RedHanded.
Yup, An Event Apart is coming to Austin. It’s actually coming to the Alamo Draft House downtown location (which is a stone’s throw from one of our client’s offices). If only it weren’t for the $500 registration fee (for one day? I love you guys, but…). I do have to say that it’s nice for these gents (Meyer, Zeldman, and Santa Maria) to grace our beloved city with their presence.
I hope that by Nov. 6th (the date of the event) this crazy ass heat will be long gone. Guys, one tip - check the weather before you come - it might be likely you’ll be wearing a sweater in the morning and a tank by the afternoon (that’s what is kindly referred to as “Texas weather” ’round these parts)…use this local station to check it out before you head this way (links to News 8 Austin weather).
I’ve been continually looking at Amazon’s S3 service as a means to provide cheap, reliable storage for personal use (archiving) but have been wondering how other folks have been using it for their business. Seems many companies are finding S3 to be an honest-to-goodness alternative for backing data up instead of the run-of-the-mill terabyte hard disk setups found in so many places. (It’s lots of hardware, lots of human resources - and I’ve seen how bad of a problem big storage units can be first hand and it’s not pretty…S3 looks great simply because you’re no longer the one babysitting.)
But now, there’s this - EC2.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
Basically, you can create a virtual machine in their computing environment for you to use as you need and on-demand. Think virtual hosting (e.g. Linode) - but on steriods - it’s the on-demand aspect that’s interesting - not only that - but the cost can’t be beat.
Here’s an interesting run through of setting up an image. I would *love* to see the man behind the curtain on this one, how they are accomplishing this feat and what’s the strategy for ensuring high-reliability while keeping a commitment to low pricing.
Why would we really need a dedicated server anymore? And why couldn’t we provide reliable hosting to our customers on our terms (and not through some third-party hosting entity who’s either oversold or doesn’t have the features to stack up)? I’m certain someone is trying this out right now and we’ll be seeing the results here shortly somewhere on a blog near you. I can’t wait for this thing to come out of it’s current limited beta…
Brilliant!
Well, after two extremely pleasing deliveries from Austin Organic Delivery, I’m happy to recommend them to everyone. Both orders have been fantastic. Fresh produce, tasty and plentiful. Here’s a pic of this week’s delivery:
Look at this massive list:
All for $46. Delivered to my doorstep. I don’t think I can beat that.
Mandatory Security Release (and more). If you’ve never read the comments thread on these release pages, give ‘er a go as there are some interesting comments and DHH is always very active in these threads.
On another note, I really like how insistent the guys are about everyone performing this upgrade:
This is a MANDATORY upgrade for anyone not running on a very recent edge (which isn’t affected by this). If you have a public Rails site, you MUST upgrade to Rails 1.1.5. The security issue is severe and you do not want to be caught unpatched.
You heard the man, get your upgrade on!
There’s nothing like having some nice, yet useful eyecandy on the mac (good ol’ quicksilver comes to mind). Well, the folks behind Shiira are taking on the big boys and out-safari-ing safari. The new Shiira beta (now Universal!) has some nice features, including the Shelf, tab expose (beautiful!) and transparent history and bookmark popups (which I like better than having them in a sidebar). What I really dig about shiira though is the Page Dock - a thumbnail image of all your current tabs at the bottom of the browser so you can see from afar what’s in each. Superb! I know some of these features might exist as plugins (or soon to be features) in Firefox (at least), but Shiira has one more thing going for it - it’s blazing fast! Currently, this beta is Tiger-only (sorry, you 10.3 folks) and is well worth the download. I am definitely going to keep track of this one as the work they are doing, especially interface-wise, is outstanding. Keep up the excellent work, Shiira team!
Just wanted to put out the word about KUT’s Tower repair issues. They are soliciting donations as the price has run over 100k (wow!). I listen to KUT a lot so this is an easy do for me. If you listen to KUT in town (NPR, natural gardener, Eklektikos, etc) at all, please consider donating.
I, unfortunately, was not able to attend SXSWi this past year…and I won’t make that mistake again. Event coordinators have already got their groove on and have the site up for next year. Registration is discounted now, but cost increases over time. Get your badget while their hot! Excuse me now while i go do a little jig… 
We should all eat better. Right? Well, at least for me, that’s hard to do. I’m stupidly busy, with a constantly changing schedule. So I find it hard to get out to the grocery store and buy good food like fruits and veggies. For the last few weeks, I’ve been daydreaming about a grocery subscription service which could put groceries in an ice chest on my porch each week for a moderate price.
Silly me, I assumed no one had thought of that before. Oh, I remember Peapod.com and various other .com busts. But they were more of a grocery delivery service that did your shopping for you and dropped it off at your house for a ridiculous price. I know nothing’s free, and I’m the first to pay a fair ( keyword ) premium for conveniences. But these online grocers would about double your food bill, and I’m not down with that.
It was understandable - there’s a very high cost for that type of convenience. You’re basically subsidizing part of a personal assistant - never cheap! But I wanted the grocery delivery! What to do? My business “idea” was to have standardized food sets which could be built and delivered cheaply. Keeping the costs down through standardization would pass on to customers and it might catch on.
Well, I was shooting the wind with my partner earlier today and he said “oh yeah, I’ve heard of that before. Google it”. Don’t ask me why, but I never bothered to google that which I was desiring. I just assumed it wasn’t out there yet, and you know what they say.. Anyhow, I stumbled around google results for a while and came across these guys: Austin Organic Delivery.
Holy cow. They hit my wishlist to a tee. You select a standardized “box” which comes in various sizes and styles. Then you can add/remove from it for a reasonable cost. Best of all, everything is organic, and most of it is locally grown. There’s one box called the Local Box which is strictly locally-grown produce. And it varies by the day. Basically, whichever local farmers pulled up that morning with some nice looking fruit or veggies get thrown in the local boxes.
That’s bonus points! It changes every day! So I’ll prolly never get two local boxes that have the same contents. For example, today’s box included personal watermelons, cantaloupe, blueberries, eggplant, garlic, arugula and about another half dozen or so things I can’t remember right now. That kinda variety is really important to me so I don’t get bored.
Anyhow, I just wanted to rave about that for a while. I’ll be getting my first delivery next Tuesday, so I’ll post a few words on the quality of the goods then. At this point, I’m 110% satisfied with the experience. They have a nice website with an intelligent, custom order system. I called them up to ask about that local box and spoke with a very friendly John Duffy. He even had to put me on hold for a second while he spoke with a local farmer making a delivery!
Here’s my first order:
Product Description Qty Each Price
---------------------------------------- --- -------- --------
Broccoli- 0.5 pound (lb) 2 @ 1.50 = 3.00
Cilantro- 1 bunch 1 @ 1.10 = 1.10
Lettuce, Romaine- 1 bunch 1 @ 1.99 = 1.99
Local Box- 1 count (ct) 1 @ 34.99 = 34.99
Spinach, Baby- 1 bag 1 @ 2.99 = 2.99
Sprouts, Alfalfa- 1 box 1 @ 1.99 = 1.99
---------------------------------------- --- -------- --------
Subtotal: $46.06
Taxable: $0.00 *
Sales Tax: $0.00
Order Total: $46.06
All in all, the pricing seems fair, and given my pleasant experience thus far, I can heartily recommend it. I’ll let you know what the produce itself is like next week.
Cheers